On July 5, 2004, the Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez agreed to start Mission Miracle to aid patients with eye diseases, as a result of the complaints from many workers in the joint Venezuelan-Cuban literacy program in Venezuela about many of their students whom they were trying to teach to read but who couldn’t even see…

Community-based medical education was the germ of what has become the Sandino Commitment, a bilateral agreement between Venezuela and Cuba announced in April 2007. This project aims to train 200,000 Latin American doctors over this decade. Like the students in ELAM, more than being trained in medicine, these doctors will be prepared with a high sense of social commitment—motivating them to care for the peoples of the region wherever they are needed, says Hugo Chavez. Venezuela is now inaugurating its own Latin American School of Medicine, similar to the one in Cuba, using the new approach to medical education. Havana's ELAM is also incorporating their new approach into its curriculum, according to its director....